REVISITING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTERNAL MARKETING AND EXTERNAL MARKETING: THE ROLE OF CUSTOMER ORIENTATION

This research aims to examine the relationship between the effectiveness of internal marketing (IM) and external marketing (EM) with customer orientation being considered the missing link (mediator) between both variables. This research is mainly a hypothetico-deductive design which employ survey questionnaire. The population was large-sized manufacturing organizations which were located in Penang, Malaysia. Judgmental sampling was employed from Federation of Malaysia Manufacturers Directory. Snowballing method was also used because some respondents were referred by the initial respondents. The contact persons at the respective entities were contacted either in person or by email. The findings of this study support the theoretical model on IM and EM effectiveness, with customer orientation being the mediator. i.e., customer orientation is the missing link between IM and EM effectiveness. Based on simple regression, the results have shown that IM is significantly related to product activities, pricing activities, promotion activities and distribution activities respectively. The results explain that IM is the right strategy to apply to large-sized manufacturing organizations.